Jane Austen: A Life (edició 1999)

This is a pretty good autobiography: It is well researched, and well-written. I felt the author has made a conscious effort to imitate Jane Austen's writing style, so that the book flows like an Austen novel about Austen's life. The overall spine of the book is straightforward: Austen was born; she grew up; she received education; she fell in love; she remained unmarried; her five works got published; she took care of nieces and nephews; she took ill and passed away. But the author writes well enough to make this an engaging story, and to deliver Austen and her family and friends as interesting characters.
( )

This is a brilliant biography of Jane Austen; I anticipated it would be, as I read the author's biography of Dickens back in 2012. She combines excellent, detailed research with an ability to tell a story of the subject's life that combines colour, incident and intelligent speculation based on her sources. This is more than just a literary biography, but also a history of the Austen and Leigh families, tracing their history back to the late 17th century; one of her great uncles born in the 17th century survived until Jane's teenage years. George Austen's clerical life combined with Cassandra Leigh's aristocratic descent in a successful marriage that produced six sons and two daughters. Jane was the shortest lived in a family that generally avoided the early mortality of most large families at that time and for long afterwards. There were plenty of scandals and jealousies and tensions as in all families, though Jane seems to have attempted to get on with all factions. Her literary career was very uneven, with her producing lots of short stories and poems from her teenage years, and before her 25th birthday having already written the first versions of what would later be published as Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and (after her death) Northanger Abbey. Then she wrote almost nothing in the first decade of the 19th century, a decade punctuated by the death of her father, and moves around the country, including an unhappy period in Bath, before her final literary period in Chawton, near Winchester. In this small village her activities are described by the author as "making the very modest house into one of the great sites of literary history" - in a period of just six years Sense and Sensibility was published in 1811, Pride and Prejudice in 1813 – and three further novels were written here, Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion (Northanger Abbey was written earlier in the 1790s). She also wrote the first 12 chapters of a new novel which was eventually published as Sanditon over a century later. Her early death at the age of 41 in 1817 in Winchester deprived the world of a great literary talent - if she had lived into her 70s as did her father and most of her siblings (and her mother lived to 87) just imagine what further works would have flowed from her pen. A great biography. ( )

An admirably even-handed telling of a life that was sparsely documented despite Austen's popular novels. Tomalin pulls a narrative out of the histories of other better known Austen family members and their friends and neighbors. She discusses the novels as a whole in a way that was new to me. There is a convincing narrative of what life may have been like for JA, the crises and satisfactions.
A photo is included of the most long-lived of Jane's brothers who died at 91, an admiral. The caption identifies him and states that he preserved Jane's letters to him for fifty years but that upon his death his daughter Fanny burned them without consulting with any other family members. I hear much literary historian's regret in that brief statement.
The author mentions that more than 500 books were published on the topic of Jane Austen just in the twenty years 1951 - 1971. She somehow doesn't get bogged down in this sea of other opinions but keeps this life story clear.
I am looking forward to reading another biog by Tomalin. ( )

The extended family of Jane Austen is so extensive that the first chapter of so was a huge stream of unfamiliar names. After getting through that, the book was more interesting because I could understand and follow it.

"The critical literature runs to thousands of volumes and tens of thousands of articles, ranging from the brilliantly illuminating to the bizarre; getting through it all is not possible, when you consider that between 1952 and 1972 alone there were 551 books, essays and articles published, not to mention 85 doctoral dissertations. On the other side of the academic fence, many readers feel strongly that she is their personal property, not to be tampered with or subjected to questions and theories." (Page 282)

"In Sense and Sensibility Elinor and Marianne act out a debate about behavior in which Austen compares the discretion, polite lies and carefully preserved privacy of one sister with truth-telling and freely expressed emotion of the other. Austen is considering how far society can tolerate openness and what the effect on the individual may be. ... These were serious questions ... For me [the author], this ambivalence makes Sense and Sensibility one of her two most deeply absorbing books - the other being Mansfield Park, which has a similar wobble in its approach. Fiction can accommodate ambivalence as polemic cannot." (Page 155)

"The ball at which Marianne is humiliated is one of her great set-pieces. That it is played out entirely as tragedy, and not as a merely embarrassing social occasion, makes it a unique moment in the novels, and is another sign that Austen credits Marianne with being more than a foolish girl and allows her depth of character and feeling. And although Austen shifts the story back into the comic mode, the tragic shadow remains over Marianne. ..." (Page 157)

"As a child ... [Jane Austen] found the power to entertain her family with her writing. At the same time, through her writing, she was developing a world of imagination in which she controlled everything that happened. She went on to create young women somewhat like herself, but whose perceptions and judgements were shown to matter; who were able to influence their own fates significantly, and who could even give their parents good advice. Her delight in this work is obvious. She was pleasing herself at least as much as she was impressing the family circle ..." (Pag173)



I also got out of this book some experiences that perhaps made it hard for her to trust - that caused her to have a protective shell.

- She was let out to a wet nurse at an early age instead of having the comfort of her own mother's arms.

- She was sent to boarding school. Some boarding schools around that time achieved noteriety for scanty food and physical abuse of pupils. There is evidence that Jane Austen's experience was less than pleasant.

- At age 25 she was again uprooted when her parents suddenly decided to move. Although a successful novelist with three published works, over the next 10 years she did not produce any new works.

- As a spinster, her lodging and income were uncertain and scant.



With the paucity of material about her life, I begin to feel like trying to learn much about her life is much less valuable than just enjoying the novels she wrote. ( )

Early 19th century author Jane Austen might be as surprised as anyone to find that she has become one of the most beloved authors in the 21st century. This biography is everything a biography should be and everything a Janeite could wish for. Many of Jane Austen’s letters were destroyed by her sister Cassandra after Jane’s death, and this has frustrated Austen scholars for decades. Tomalin makes up for this gap in the record by mining the letters and papers of Austen’s extended family, friends, and neighbors. The well-selected illustrations, the map of Jane Austen’s Hampshire, her family tree, end notes, and bibliography make it useful for students and scholars. General readers will appreciate Tomalin’s engaging and highly readable prose. ( )